Abstract
In Norway more than 95 % of the students in each annual school-leaving cohort from the lower-secondary school continues on to upper secondary education. The result is that there is a wide range of abilities among the students, and so various forms of adaptation are necessary. Each year almost 10 % of the new entrants in upper secondary are classified as students with special needs.
The main topic of this paper is how different forms of adaptation influence the flow of students through upper secondary education. Two groups are compared: one with students who in their fist year are taught exclusively within ordinary classes, and one with students who receive adapted teaching in small groups outside ordinary classes. This analysis will illuminate how different degrees of inclusion influence successes as well as failures among those students.
A sample of 600 special needs students from six Norwegian counties have been followed prospectively twice a year from 1996 to 1999. In this paper the results of these follow-up studies are presented within a framework based on transitions in the life course.
Special needs students in Norway
One after the other, the youth cohorts march onwards and upwards through school and society. When their compulsory education is completed, it is the turn of upper secondary school. And that is the situation for an ever-increasing percentage of the year-group. In Norway some 96 % of those who leave lower secondary school are to be found six months later in some form of upper secondary education (Statistics Norway 1999:6). In this way the group of students becomes very complex, with a wide range of abilities, and therefore special organisation of the teaching is necessary for those who have special problems of a somatic, psychic or social character.
Every autumn about 6000 special needs students embark on their first year of upper secondary education. They represent almost 10 % of the total number of students on the Basic Course. The school year 1997-98 there were 6851 students who applied for specially organised teaching programmes, representing 9.4 % of the almost 73 000 applicants to the Basic Course that year (Edvardsen et al 1998:20). But not all the applicants are offered their first choice, and neither do all those offered places, accept them, so that the situation would be somewhat different after the admission and clearing process is over. Then the statistics reveal barely 6000 special needs students, which is 9.5 % of all those who started on a Basic Course autumn 1997.
Specially organised teaching can in a way be seen as a helping hand from society to that section of the youth group who have the poorest aptitude for schooling at this level. Or perhaps we should rather refer to it as the safety net that is meant to catch the problems before they become too great. Considerable resources have been devoted to this support programme, but the effects of these measures are not evident. However, it is not easy to assess the way in which specially organised teaching programmes work. A start can however be made by investigating what happens to those students who receive specially organised teaching, those who are here referred to as special needs students. How is the road ahead influenced by the problems the students have at the start of their journey? How is the flow affected by various forms of special teaching methods? These are the main topics of this article, which is based on the research project Reform 94 - specially organised teaching. This project is financed by the Ministry of Church, Education and Research and administered by Volda University College and Møre Research during the period 1995-2000.
Transitions in the course of education
The life course perspective is frequently used when young people' lives are studied. Basically, the term life course refers to the course of the biological ageing process, a process that everyone experiences on their way from cradle to grave. But this is just one aspect. For social science, the life in society is the crucial point. An individual's life course is influenced by past events and actions, can be affected by present frame factors and can often be understood on the basis of future expectations. The life course can be comprehended as the sum of those part-careers, e.g. in education, work and family life, which individuals and groups follow through contexts that often change in character.
The life course perspective is useful when we are to analyse the long lines individuals and cohorts follow through varying geographical environments and changing historical contexts. But naturally, the life course does not just manifest itself in the long term, but also in the short term, and then the concept transition is the most appropriate. Here, therefore, certain perspectives on the transitions in the course of education will be focused on as a general background for the empirical analyses that will appear later.
In our research, two types of transition in particular have been studied: dropping out from upper secondary school and being transferred from the one course level to the next. This is the combined result of individual events and actions by the students that affects the student flow through upper secondary school, a flow which Reform 94 aimed to improve.
A transition is a marked and more or less permanent change that is influenced by social norms and expectations. In that way, transitions differ from episodes, events that happen more by chance, and which are not regulated by norms. Examples of transitions can be moving out from your parents' home or starting a new course of studies. In educational research the term transition is particularly useful, because the problems often make themselves apparent at the time of transferring between schools and types of schools or in not transferring at the normal time to a higher level. The difficulties for the special needs students often appear when they do not manage to keep in step with their peers - the transitions are made off time.
Typical for the education course is that it is linked together in a chain of transitions. This also applies to leaving lower secondary and starting at upper secondary school. But it may also be a question of breaking off one's schooling and of transition to work or unemployment. These transitions may be motivated by negative factors in the school environment or by the attraction of more interesting adaptations outside school. Often it can be a combination of such push and pull factors that decides whether the student drops out of school. The thinking around push factors, which force the student out of school, and pull factors, which tempt with their attractive adaptation outside school, are reminiscent of the push-pull theories in migration research. An example is Everet Lee's article «A Theory of Migration» (1966), in which it is assumed that the potential migrants calculate plus and minus factors both at the place they are leaving and where they are moving to before they make the final choice of localisation. Intervening obstacles also play a role in the decision.
Ralph McNeal has studied the role school plays in creating dropouts among students. He emphasises in particular structural and contextual elements. Structural elements are the size of the school, the ratio teacher-student, specialisation and learning intensity. The contextual involve school climate, the emphasis placed on various subjects and the social environment. After comprehensive multivariate analyses McNeal (1997:220) can establish that there are two elements in particular that contribute to high dropout, namely a large number of students per teacher (i.e. large classes) and a high proportion of minorities among the students. Therefore it is not correct to regard dropping out simply as an individual matter, and the research ought thus to be expanded to consider surrounding contexts that influence student behaviour, such as teaching conditions, family, peers and the local community. But these are demanding tasks that are not always easy to address within the bounds of each individual research project.
During the course of studies there are many different types of transition. Dropping out of school is an example of an external transition. In addition there are internal transitions. Typical of these is being transferred from one course level to the next, e.g. from the initial Basic Course to the first-year Advanced Course. We can call this a vertical transition, as opposed to switching line of studies at the same level, which is a typical horizontal transition. The distinctions between the various types of transition - internal, external, horizontal, vertical - are useful analytically, but we should still bear in mind that in the life course, these transitions are often linked. In this way the basis of successful adaptation to working life is often to be found in tidy transitions on one's way through a course of studies. This point is also emphasised strongly in an OECD-report, in which the theme is the transition to adult status for young handicapped persons. Here the fact is stressed that one is talking about a transitional process that in the first place involves the final years at school, then the actual transition period and finally independent adult status with work and a place to live (CERI 1986:9). Transitions can also be studied as exits from a system and as entries into another one. For the exact reason that not all students go directly from lower to upper secondary school, this can be a useful distinction (cf Myklebust 1997).
Transitions do not take place in social vacuums. During the course of their studies, the students meet other actors who function as gatekeepers in the transitional situations. These gatekeepers both regulate and rule, both stimulate and dominate at the same time (cf Behrens and Rabe-Kleberg 1992). Per Solvang is one of those who adopts this approach, but he uses the term «status passage» instead of «transition». When a decision is to be taken as to whether a student is to be moved up a level or not, the teachers then become passage agents (cf Solvang 1994:272). Some of them will then function as passage facilitators, while others in unfortunate cases will be passage obstacles.
The gatekeeper idea indicates that the life course is not a solo run, but that it is woven into surrounding structures, where many other actors play decisive roles. It is this fact the principle of linked lives is meant to remind us about (cf. Elder and Shananan 1997: 26-28). The most central persons in the network or weave around the special needs students will often be their parents, but siblings and grandparents are also important. The same applies to friends in the neighbourhood and fellow students at school. It is a huge task to analyse how the surrounding environment influences the adaptation process of special needs students. In the research report Innestenging, utestenging eller inkludering? (Shut in the classroom - shut out from learning ?) (Kvalsund and Myklebust 1998a), this has been done to some extent in two chapters. In one chapter the focus is special needs students in ordinary classes; while another chapter discusses the role of parents in the lives of special needs students.
Internationally there are many studies that follow groups of special needs students during the course of their education. Different types of transitional patterns have in this way been documented. Examples of this research are Thomson and Ward (1994) in Scotland, and Murray (1997), Svensson and Stahl (1996) in Sweden. In the report When the terms vary (Kvalsund, Myklebust, Båtevik and Steinsvik 1998), this research is discussed in greater detail and viewed in the context of our own work.
Briefly about methods and material
It is not easy to follow young people on their wandering through the system of education. The course structure channels the students in certain directions, but the students are not passive creatures who just float along the channels. They are also actors who experience and react, and who in turn choose and reject possible alternatives. These are processes that are taking place continually, but which are impossible for the researcher to monitor all the time. To do that we would have to stay one step behind each student with a video camera.
Our solution has not been moving images, but still photographs taken at various points in time. However, it is easier to follow the race when everyone starts at the same time. That is why we have chosen as our point of departure one particular cohort, those admitted to upper secondary school in the autumn of 1995. To restrict the amount of work involved, we have limited ourselves to the six counties Finnmark, Nord-Trøndelag, Møre og Romsdal, Rogaland, Hedmark and Oslo. (In Møre og Romsdal, Nord-Trøndelag and Hedmark we have, in addition, collected data about the cohort admitted autumn 1994, which in many instances have been used as a comparison with the primary cohort.)
As a result of three rounds of data-gathering in the spring 1996, we received information about just over 2000 special needs students from the two admission cohorts mentioned above. That gives a response rate of around 90 % (cf Kvalsund and Myklebust 1998b).
In the first wave of data-collection in the spring of 1996, using the most comprehensive questionnaire, we got information about 592 students from the 1995-cohort. It is these students we have here chosen to follow on their journey through upper secondary education. Every six months up until the end of their third year of studies we have received new information about these special needs students. This gives a total of five snapshots of the situation at various stages of their upper secondary school studies. Schematically the data-collection programme for this cohort can be presented as follows:
Figure 1. Data collection programme for the cohort admitted autumn 1995
In an earlier research report, this data collection is described and discussed (Kvalsund and Myklebust 1998b).
Fuctional difficuiculties, type of class and students' results
Several publications from this research project have documented how the special needs students term by term make their way through the school. The many vertical and horizontal transitions indicate that there are not only one-way processes, in the sense that the students only travel in one direction. The observed patterns are, on the other hand, the total result of a complicated interplay of transitions term by term. We find normal progress from level to level and abnormal lagging behind. There is dropout from the courses, but also later resumption of studies, at least to a certain degree. And the roads go criss-cross, back and forth between various branches of study and different types of specially organised teaching. The results of these transitions are that by the end of the third school year, 24 % of the 1995-cohort are on schedule , 31 % are behind schedule, while around 45 % have turned their backs on upper secondary school, temporarily or permanently (cf Myklebust 1999:165)
There are, however, great variations among the special needs students - in the same way as there are differences among the students on ordinary terms. Among other things, the special needs students have different backgrounds from their earlier schooling, they have various types of problems, and they receive teaching that is specially organised in a variety of ways. This means that the route through upper secondary education is not the same for all of them, and thus various patterns develop as regards moving up a level, getting behind schedule or dropping out. A previous report documented how different selection factors influenced the flow pattern for the 1995-cohort up to the middle of the third school year (Kvalsund and Myklebust 1998a: 78-83). The tendencies are more or less the same at the end of the third year. For example, there is better progression and less dropout from general studies than from vocational courses. Another piece of data is that two-thirds of those who rejected the offer of specially organised teaching during the first year, are out of upper secondary education by the end of the third school year. There is also a clear tendency that indicates that those with a high degree of absence during the first year, have later turned their backs on upper secondary school. In other words, it can be said that a tendency among students towards distancing oneself from school in the early stages has become complete rejection later in the course of their education.
Space here does not allow a detailed consideration of the various selection factors. Therefore the discussion will be restricted to an analysis of how the outcome by the end of the third school year is influenced by two crucial factors: The students' resources - here measured by an additive index called total burden of problems - and the type of class attended.
Burden of problems
With the first data collection in spring 1996 we gained an overview of how form teachers and counsellors assessed various difficulties and problem conditions among the special needs students in the 1995-cohort. The aim of this registration was to gain an insight into what formed the basis for the special teaching programme for each individual student. In other words we wanted to find out what diagnoses had already been made. But in many respects these diagnoses can be seen as social constructions and not as objective categorisations (cf Kvalsund and Myklebust 1996:106, Fylling 1998:144). Not least for that reason, it is important to be sceptical in the face of exaggerated concentration on defects, a focusing that can easily lead to branding those who are given various forms of diagnoses:
One tends to concentrate on what they cannot do or cannot succeed in. The aim is fair enough; the students are to be given help to master what they cannot do. At the same time, this has drawn attention away from what the students are actually capable of, and of their resources. It is particularly in work with students who have comprehensive or serious functional disorders that this can create a state of unfortunate expectations (Ogden 1995:57-58).
Even though one has little faith in a fine-meshed passing of diagnoses which is often simply followed up with coarse-meshed measures, it can still be useful to register these diagnoses. The idea then is to investigate whether the wandering through the upper secondary system is different for student categories that have been registered in the first year as being burdened with various degrees of problems.
Myklebust (2000:5) documents what kinds of diagnoses the students in the 1995-cohort have. According to the reports from the schools, about half the special needs students have general learning difficulties. In the questionnaire that was used, this means a mental handicap of a minor or serious degree. Furthermore, it is apparent that more than a half of these students struggle with reading and writing. The numbers are also fairly large when it comes to psycho-social problems, such as difficulties with human interaction, challenging behaviour, lack of care or drug problems in the home. Problematic conditions like these affect about a third of these students. Clearly defined functional difficulties related to eyesight, hearing, movement and co-ordination affect just a small percentage.
There is no clear relation between functional difficulties and dropout by the end of the third school year. Only the students with the most severe functional difficulties, the fourth quartile, shows less dropout then the rest. But there is a strong connection between progression and the degree of problems. Those special needs students who at the start of upper secondary school had only minor functional difficulties, are to a far greater extent on schedule than those with great functional disabilities. Those who in the first school year had the most comprehensive problems are those who are furthest behind schedule, but these students are also those who in the least extent have turned their backs on school. This is not unexpected, because it is these students who have the weakest resources to exploit in other arenas outside school. But it is also these same students who often are met with the least understanding if they try to gain acceptance in work and social life in society at large outside the school walls.
Type of class
The first school year, 43 % of the students in the 1995-cohort received specially planned teaching solely within the framework of ordinary classes. Almost 30 % were placed in classes with a reduced number of students (groups of eight), whilst 10 % received all their teaching in groups of four. The rest varied between various types of class or had other forms of special arrangements. Type of class influences students' outcome by the end of the third year in this way:
Students who in the first year received all their special programmes within ordinary classes, show distinctly better progress than the others. Among the former, 40 % are on schedule at the end of the third school year, while the corresponding figure for those in groups of four is less than 10 %. On the other hand, the dropout is greatest among those who in their first year received special attention solely in ordinary classes. It is by far the least in the groups of four. This pattern indicates that the students with the greatest problems, who consequently are to be found in special classes, stay in school to a greater extent than the other students, but then in some form of behind schedule. The students who attend ordinary classes, probably have greater resources to exploit in arenas outside school. Therefore they more easily drop out of school if they begin to be left behind their peers in class. But it is also the special needs students in ordinary classes who most easily discover that they are falling behind in relation to their classmates, if the special teaching programme is not up to scratch. Dropping out may then be a form of rejection of the school that does not help them to keep in step with their peers.
There are naturally other factors that affect the tendency of the special needs students to drop out of school. Here suffice it to mention one: The intensive support offered to the students in special classes, gives the students a secure base which they are loath to leave. In a way this is positive, at least in the short term, but in the long term this segregation can make integration more difficult both in the school society and in society at large. In this way the «special pedagogical island kingdom» has a rather diffuse double role (cf Kvalsund and Myklebust 1998a:127-143).
The combined effect of type of class and burden of problems
The big question, however, is this: What are the outcomes like for special needs students who have about the same degree of functional difficulties, but who are offered different forms of specially organised teaching? Here I attempt to analyse the combined effect of the burden of problems and the special teaching programmes. But the approach is fairly simple because we are here concentrating on just two general types of specially organised teaching. The first category comprises the special needs students who receive all their special teaching together with other students in ordinary classes. The other category involves all those who are placed in groups of eight, four or who have some combination of measures. From time to time they may also receive special teaching together with students on ordinary terms, but that is not the dominant form of organisation. A further simplification is that we are only looking at how the burden of problems and the special measures during the first school year influence the situation at the end of the third year. Even so, the following figures provide some signals regarding very interesting connections.
Figure 2. Per cent on schedule at the end of the third year by sum of problems and type of class the first year. Cohort admitted 1995.
When we here compare categories of students who to begin with have roughly similar degrees of functional difficulties, we see that the route ahead seems to be influenced by the type of specially organised teaching received during the first year of upper secondary school. Special needs students with all the special teaching given in ordinary classes clearly show the best progress. The proportion who are on schedule is for each category of the problem variable more than twice as high among these special needs students as it is among those who received special teaching programmes outside the ordinary classes during their first year in upper secondary school. On the other hand, the latter students are those who are clearly farthest behind schedule (cf Myklebust 1999:176).
Figure 3. Per cent dropout at the end of the third year by sum of problems and type of class the first year. Cohort admitted 1995.
Among special needs students in ordinary classes the dropout rate is higher the more severe the problems are. Among students in special classes no such relation can be observed. On the contrary, the dropout is dramatically reduced among students in the fourth quartile, those with the most serious problems.
In the first quartile - students with minor problems - the dropout rate is highest among students in special classes. In the other quartiles, abandoning school is more common among special needs students in ordinary classes. This difference is especially striking among the students with the most severe functional difficulties. This fact may be interpreted as an indication of the problems of differentiation in classes with a wide range of abilities among the students. The fact that the dropout rate in the first quartile is higher among students in special classes may be an evidence of the same problem. The general pattern then seems to be that students who are markedly different from the majority in the classes, opt to abandon upper secondary school. And this happens in ordinary as well as in special classes. It is distinct patterns that we see documented in the previous figures. The differences are marked, and they do not reveal any substantial changes if we include other variables in the analysis. If we in addition to sum of problems include the level of grades from the first year at upper secondary school, the original pattern is not altered: the special needs students in ordinary classes make the best progress, but also reveal the highest dropout.
Here then, we have used the total burden of problems as an indicator, but a similar picture also appears if we compare students with the same type of problem. An example is the special needs students who experience general learning difficulties. 24 % of the students with these problems, who receive all their specially adapted teaching programmes in ordinary classes during the first school year, are on schedule at the end of the third year. Among those with identical problems, but with teaching programmes in special classes, the corresponding figure is 9 %. The dropout rate is also different: students with general learning difficulties in ordinary classes have a dropout rate of 54 at the end of the third school year. The figure is 35 for those students who receive special teaching in groups of eight and four.
Not all special needs students receive the same type of specially organised education all the time. During the school years many of them alternate between ordinary classes, special classes and small groups. But these changes along the way have little effect on the pattern we can observe at the end of the third school year. Specially adapted teaching in ordinary classes during the first school year results in the best progress, but also the highest dropout. Specially adapted programmes outside ordinary classes results in the poorest progress as regards being moved up to the next level, but here the dropout is distinctly lower. The connections are very clear, but the cause and effect relationship still seems to be somewhat vague.
A reservation should be made here. These analyses are based on rather wide categorisations, both in the case of types of problems and the various forms of specially adapted teaching programmes. But in spite of this, I think it is possible to draw the following conclusion: if the aim is to get as many students as possible through upper secondary school within the normal time schedule, then the special needs students ought to be offered specially adapted teaching programmes within the framework of ordinary classes. This applies to both those with minor and those with serious problems. But if the aim is to prevent dropout, in other words to keep as many students as possible under education, then the vast majority of special needs students ought to be offered specially adapted teaching in special classes and small groups. The exception is special needs students who experience minor problems. In fact, they reveal just as high a dropout rate outside as they do in ordinary classes. Perhaps this may be an indication of the fact that these students regard being placed in groups of eight or four as a mistake?
The links that have been established between progression and organisation of the teaching in upper secondary school correspond well with the patterns documented by Eifred Markussen for a sample of students in the 1994-cohort. When he controlled for grades from lower secondary school, social background, gender, diagnosis and age at the start of school, he is able to conclude as follows:
Youth who receive specially adapted teaching in ordinary classes have a greater chance of qualifying for university matriculation or achieving a vocational qualification, all other things being equal, than students who are offered specially adapted teaching programmes in separate classes (Markussen 1999:216).
But these are complex relationships and must be studied more closely in the future. There are a number of relevant questions to be asked. A crucial one is this: When a student is placed in a special class, is this a signal that overshadows the issue of formal qualification? (cf Tøssebro (1999:264). If that is the case, we may be dealing with self-fulfilling prophecies, perhaps on both sides of the teacher's desk.
Transitions in a vulnerable phase of life
In this article we have followed an intake cohort on its journey through three years of upper secondary school. This particular cohort from 1995 belongs to the small birth cohorts from the end of the 1970s. The decreasing number of children born around 1980 has in the last few years resulted in fewer students in upper secondary school, and this will continue to be the case for a number of years yet. In the coming five-year period, the number of 16-18 year-olds will be around 15 % lower than it was in 1990 (KUF 1997:3-4). In small birth-groups the «cohort crowding» is less than in larger ones, and therefore each individual has more room to play with (cf Easterlin 1987). It may therefore be somewhat easier to get an education and a job. We see this from one of the key documents on which the introduction of Reform 94 is based:
In the course of the nineties the demographic development will result in smaller year-groups of youths. The reduced year-groups mean that fewer young people will be available to secure the future recruitment and renewing of qualifications in all the professions necessary to a modern society. Norway cannot afford to waste its «human capital», but must exploit these resources to the maximum if the country is to maintain and develop the necessary know-how (NOU 1991:4:11).
The demographic situation will then be favourable for the youth groups for a few years ahead, and this advantage can be a good thing to have in a situation where the changes are rapid and the transformations many, features that are typical of the so-called risk society.
It is Ulrich Beck who has suggested the idea of the risk society. In this new type of society, it is necessary to be constantly inventive and smart, quick and creative, in order to avoid losing in the face of competition. This sort of society requires of the individuals that they act ultra-rationally. In the future they will have to be «actors, constructors, jugglers, producers of their own biography, identity, but also of their own social ties and networks» (Beck 1997:113). And this is no distant future. There are many evidences indicating that calculation as a lifestyle is becoming an ever stronger trend in society (Løchen 1999:115).
The fact that this «calculation-society» can easily become a caricature of a society is obvious to most of us. Not least will such a focus on maximising utility affect individuals with special needs, because they are not equals in this competition:
The implicit assumption that people have a variety of means open to them to choose amongst is necessarily fragile when applied to those with learning difficulties, for whom options are very limited in societies dominated by utility (Riddel, Baron and Wilkinson 1998:532).
Young people represent in many ways a risk category. One of the reasons is that in your youth there are many decisive transitions to be made. This period in life can be experienced as a series of related status passages. This may be called cumulative transitions, in the sense that one transition sets off a new one. The most important are the transfer from school to work, from living at home with one's parents to living alone and from being single to starting a family. But the transitions earlier in life can also be demanding for many people, because children and young people have little control with the formation of their own life courses (cf Alexander, Entwisle and Dauber 1994:221).
Problematic transitions are a fairly common phenomenon that affects far more people than students with specially organised teaching programmes. This is apparent from, among other things, an analysis of the flow pattern of the complete Basic Course cohort in Norway that started upper secondary school in the autumn of 1994. Here it is documented that only about one third of those who do not manage the transfer to the Advanced Course 1 level the second year, later manage to get back on schedule with their education in the course of the next three years (Støren, Skjersli and Aamodt 1998:178).
The fact that the journey towards completing one's education can be rather untidy for far more people than those with special needs, is also apparent from the report Shut in the classroom - shut out from learning ? (Kvalsund and Myklebust 1998a: 43-52). Here a study is presented that involves about 3400 students from 13 schools in different parts of Norway. Nearly 95 % of the students have been accepted on ordinary terms. More than 20 % of these students have at some time during the last six months seriously considered dropping out of school. Moreover, the analyses have uncovered the contours of a syndrome that can be called becoming detached from school. This syndrome is prevalent among students who often fail to solve tasks they are given, students who are not awarded grades in all the key subjects, and students with reduced well-being in their classes. If this in addition applies to students who usually spend the breaks smoking and who do not feel that they are offered teaching appropriate to their needs in class, it is probable that the idea of quitting school will be considered. For some, this will probably mark the introduction to a later career typified by fits and starts.
Transitions are in themselves risky projects, and in particular can these changes be critical for young people with limited school resources. This group is often regarded vulnerable (cf Coles 1997:78-80). Special needs students are therefore in a danger zone, not simply because they have disabilities of various kinds, but also because their transitions often come at times outside the normal schedule of things, a delay that is often associated with these same disabilities. Things can turn out to be serious for those who experience protracted and disjointed transitions (cf Coles 1995:10), and this is typical for many special needs students. In many instances the situation can become particularly critical for students who lack the support of a solid home environment (cf Roberts 1997:59).
Different types of material and social resources in the parents' home represent a kind of ballast that the young people can take with them on their journey. Here it is not simply a question of parents' homes that function as a financial safety net when the children face difficulties in the job market, but also the mental and social security that is to be found in growing up in stable and well-functioning homes. In other words, the «support team» in the home affects how safe and secure the journey through the education system and society becomes. This is a fact that is recognised by an increasing number of researchers (cf Hall, Williamson and Goeffey 1998:306-07). But young people are often not conscious of these resources in the home environment, these are benefits that are more or less taken for granted (Allat 1997:138).
Not least the parents of disabled children and young people are faced with challenging dilemmas in connection with transitions. Particularly difficult is the balance between parental care and a future independent life for the young person concerned (cf Richardson and Ritchie 1989). In one study conducted by researches in the project Reform 94 - specially organised teaching, a sample of parents at two upper secondary schools have been interviewed. Here we got a vivid impression of how the parents experience having a disabled child, and how they must fight for the rights of the youngsters. Opinions are of course divided, but most parents are satisfied with the teaching and the support their children are offered at the upper secondary level. But they are very concerned about what the future holds as regards a place to live, a job and an independent life. Not least are they afraid of what will happen in a few years' time when they themselves no longer are in a position to take responsibility. On the basis of life course theory this phenomenon is referred to as fear of transition (Kvalsund and Myklebust 1998a:158). One example is the father who dreads the day when he is no longer able to control his occasionally aggressive son who is becoming physically stronger year by year. In those forms of society dominated by strategic innovation and market logic, it often becomes critical to lack educational resources, as will be the case for many special needs students. Youth whose education is lacking in some respect can easily lose their footing and end up in social and economic trouble. A counsellor whom we interviewed expressed the fear that many of the special needs students could end as the prison inmates of the future. This counsellor had experience from teaching in prisons and thus had a vivid impression of how critical their educational background can be for the life course of young people.
Even so, many of these students may, of course, manage well later in life, but some of those who do not achieve vocational or academic qualifications, will belong to a vulnerable group that can easily become victims of the processes of exclusion and marginalisation. Not least for that reason, it is important to monitor closely what happens to special needs students, also after their time in upper secondary education is over. Then it will be possible to register what role different gatekeepers and agents of change play in ensuring a successful adaptation for young people, including those whose point of departure has given them a rougher ride than most experience on their journey through the system of education (cf McGinty and Fish 1992:88-99).
Well-organised special teaching programmes require varied forms of differentiation, but these are questions that are outside the bounds of this article. However, some general perspectives will be presented in conclusion.
If segregated teaching in small groups is reduced to a minimum, it will necessarily have considerable consequences for both special needs students and those admitted on normal terms. If the strong arguments in favour of inclusive education were really translated into practical policies, it could in turn contribute to important social change. The point is that the students of today are tomorrow's adults, those whose responsibility it will be to build society for coming generations. And special needs students and students on ordinary terms who have grown up to accept inclusive education in ordinary classes as the norm, will by and large take inclusion for granted when they later take their part in work and society at large. This can help to create a more open and more tolerant society in the future. That is why the question of inclusion and exclusion is not just an issue for the education sector. (A convincing argumentation in favour of inclusive education is to be found, among others, in Florian 1998.) But it is another matter that a more comprehensive practice of inclusion will also have to lead to greater differentiation in the ordinary classes. If not, the result might be even higher dropout among the weaker students. This is at least the interpretation to be put on the data concerning dropping out, learning difficulties and specially organised teaching programmes that has been presented in this article. There is an enormous challenge here in creating an educational policy that includes the whole youth group.
Many of the transitions in school and at work are potentially reversible. Special needs students are, like anybody else, developing all the time, and therefore the question may arise of changing course along the way. A perspective that assumes stable, permanent choices regarding education and careers, is therefore, more often than not, mistaken. Teachers, fellow students and parents must remember that this also applies to special needs students. Their abilities, dreams and plans must also be taken seriously, even though not every idea may seem equally realistic to begin with. But the point is that the vast majority of the students on ordinary terms do not have stable and realistic plans for the next stage of their life course either. How then can one expect students with various forms of disabilities to have them? That is exactly why it is so important to allow for second choices and the opportunity to return to upper secondary education. Not least for special needs students, neither internal nor external transitions should be regarded as definite.
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